Dan Farrelly

danfarrelly.com

A small static site generator: markdown posts rendered through React components to plain HTML. No client-side JS, no bundler.

Setup

corepack enable
pnpm i
pnpm build

Scripts

Command	Description
pnpm build	Render index.html, blog/<slug>/index.html, and rss.xml
pnpm watch	Rebuild on changes to posts, components, lib, or CSS
pnpm serve	Serve the built site at http://localhost:8080

Layout

build.js          Generator entrypoint
posts/*.md        Content — YAML frontmatter + markdown, one file per page
components/*.jsx  Templates, rendered with renderToStaticMarkup
lib/              Frontmatter parsing, RSS generation, URL/date helpers
css/style.css     The only stylesheet, served as-is
images/           Served as-is; per-post assets live in images/posts/<slug>/

Writing a post

Add posts/<slug>.md. The filename is the slug, and the page is published at /blog/<slug>/. Posts are ordered by date, newest first.

---
title: "Post title"
date: "2026-08-12"
description: "Shown on the homepage, in the feed, and as og:description."
image: "/images/posts/<slug>/featured-image.png"
tags:
  - "tag one"
  - "tag two"
---

Body content...

Optional frontmatter:

• canonical / canonicalSource — for posts first published elsewhere. Sets <link rel="canonical"> and shows an attribution note above the body.
• xImpressions — view count appended to that attribution note.
• page: true — give it a URL but keep it off the homepage and out of the feed (this is how about.md works).
• draft: true — skip it entirely.